Somewhere between a gas station snack and a civic institution, the Hubig’s fried pie occupies a category entirely its own in New Orleans.
Simon Hubig founded his pie company in Fort Worth in 1922, and the New Orleans bakery opened that same year on Dauphine Street in the Faubourg Marigny, just blocks from the Ninth Ward border. Every other location in his southeastern chain collapsed during the Depression. New Orleans held on.
For nearly a century, the bakery ran out of that same building, turning out glazed hand pies daily until a predawn grease fire gutted the factory in July 2012 and knocked the whole operation out of commission.
The city noticed in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t grow up here. Corner stores pulled the display hooks off their registers. People talked about it the way they talked about losing Katrina landmarks.
Ten years passed before the Ramsey family, third-generation owners, brought production back in November 2022 from a new factory in Elmwood. The pies showed up at a pop-up near the Oak Street Po-Boy Festival and sold out in under an hour.
The pie itself is a glazed fried pocket, roughly four ounces of dough sealed around a fruit filling, and deep-fried until the outside sets into a stiff, sugary shell that cracks when bitten. The glaze is thick and white, coating the fingers immediately. The filling inside stays hot long after the outside cools, which is the source of roughly half the Hubig’s injuries on record.
Six staple flavors run year-round: apple, lemon, peach, pineapple, chocolate, and coconut. Seasonal flavors rotate in, including blueberry, strawberry, cherry, banana, sweet potato, and raspberry. Sign up for Pie Mail at hubigs.com to get notified when the seasonal runs drop.
Today, the pies land at grocery stores, convenience stores, hardware stores, and corner markets across the New Orleans area and along the Gulf Coast as far as Gulf Shores, Alabama. Finding one in the city requires almost no effort, which is exactly how it should be. Check the store locator at hubigs.com for the nearest retailer, or order for nationwide shipping through Goldbelly.
